Facebook | Broderick Fox's Photos - SIlverlake Rally

Facebook | Broderick Fox's Photos - SIlverlake Rally

Signs and Symbols of proposition 8 on gay marriage

note: click the above link broderick fox photos to view the poster i refer to in the below essay



This is a powerful and moving poster indeed! But,does it move the message in a concilliatory direction or further polarize entrenched positions in the gay rights movement ? I think it polarizes. Full of anger, defiance, resolve, and solidarity, the poster is very "early 20'th century" iconography, and reminds of the ones where oppressed workers of the world unite in the face of overbearing oppression. Its message leaves little ambiguity indeed... But,what are we trying to acheive here if not some compassionate break witht the past. While the signs , symbols, and images for the gay liberation movement must suggest this anger as the driving initial impetus,it must also contain the symbol of an all encompassing understanding that the news anchor Keith Olbermann spoke of in his moving 11/10/08 comment on CNBC.

Perhaps a compassionate appreciation of the history of the institution of marriage, and the the fear that compels these long held religious definitions concerning what constitutes the legal and social bonds of love between couples, is what's needed here. FEAR of change and fear of moral breakdown is the driving element that tempers and fixes these values. Using another line from the book of Jesus: "Forgive them for they know not what they do."

Seems me that the highest form of love is a disinterested compassion that strives to understand the deeper origins of human failing in self and in "other" and thus can be loving towards those who are stuck in history... stuck still in all of our failings to accept the multitude of minority posiitions whether racial, sexual, gender preference, tribe, whatever. These people are not anything if they are not stuck in history. Dug in back along an ascending arc of human understanding.

.
We all come from this failing, we have passed this spot; and some of us have begun to move beyond it. If love remains throughout, the rest will come in time.It's just gonna happen. It's just a question of time, intensity, and endurance... and how many people peacefully join the movement. NO DOUBT THIS WILL BE OVERCOME

WHY DAVE THE TRUCKER IS A RADICAL MALE FEMINIST...... (there can not be too many people inhabiting this demographic niche)
..

Hey thnx for the great article going to the point of the real irony in Palin's candidacy. Irony in that the feminist movement is firmly rooted in
progressive left thinking. Granted.Palin's beliefs, however, are not progressive at all,but actually part of the continuing studies in the ancient mold of the early mysogynists who set up the current macho thinking we have inherited over a couple millennia or so. In sex alone does she buck the system. In every other utterance she is anything but rooted in progressive thought. Indeed, Palin's world view in its pure form represents one of the most antiquated and
unimaginative still surviving views of "man's" narrative on the planet. One that was founded upon state and religious based misogyny thousands of years ago. Though the early "church fathers,"after the death of Christ, would never have referred to themselves as misogynists, establishing moral codes and state laws that made women the property of men, that's what they were. That's what we all come from and still are to a large extent. It is a bible based view, with an historical record and it still represents the foundation of much of our cutural value system today. In the West this view became fixed with the acceptance of Christianity as the state religion by the declining Roman Empire desperately trying to keep it all together. This world view early on linked religious structures w/ male dominated power based hierarchies......
These beliefs today, if adhered to in their literal forms, are counter Enlightenment, and are outright dangerous when incorporated into the philosophical framework of those who would "lead us" from the highest offices in the world..... whether Christian, Muslim .... whatever.... For example, if the Rapture is near at hand, why work toward any global warming policy to save the planet, or reach out to sit down unconditionally with the swarthy "Muslim Moor" billions of people strong planet wide.

........Truly the ultimate tragedy of this age old misogyny proves consequent in the 3'rd world where people are still bought and sold, mostly women and children, and daily continue to die of starvation, lack of water and disease.........




.......So, therefore, the conservative position by strict
philosophical definition, is against feminism, because frminism suggests radical and fundamental change It is amazing and
encouraging that less than 100 years after women's suffrage here in America, the
feminist movement has effected the collective psyche enough to the
point where a critical mass has tipped the balance enough for a women to be a viable candidate
for the highest office here in the U.S.. Finally, though, here in the American empire, and Europe as well, the dominant and most
we are still firmly based on male dominated
hierarchical structures......... We are still closer to our ancient roots, closer to Rome, than we are to our potential becoming.


a brief digression into Obama... then back to the Palin phenomena
.

Barack Obama perhaps is unaware of this dimension of his presidency, and does not seem to act consciously toward cultivating the cult of his own personality,thank god, but just the symbol of the man OUT OF AFRICA ,and Indonesia, Hawaii and Harvard law school.....the man w/ 3 vowells in his name open O in the beginning; open A in the middle.... opening out again with an A ...... compare all the other Presidents names and nothing comes close to this open vowelled name. They are all white male anglo saxon names. Reminds me of the French sybolist poet Rimbaud- this fix on the vowellic sounds of the man's name ... the music and rythm of it all..... this is a far more profound yet sweetly passive a revolution than we Americans yet realise. The stage upon which this Obama revolution will pay out effecting subliminal modes of thought here in America and in more overt ways as he strides out into the world w/ new notions of the rules of engagement on a global level,remains to be seen. All signs though seem to suggest, and this is premature wishfull thinking, that this is the true genius of his intelligence.
In essence the hope is that the change we all seek, whether unwittingly, symbolically, consciously or not, in OUR CHOICE FOR LEADERSHIP moves the entire species in ever so small social tectonic shifts. But these shifts in the direction of this new mode traject out to a place that history itself calls for if we are to survive the nuclear era. How on earth are we to survive this era when the likes of Bush and Cheney, and their heir apparents in McCain/Palin, pronounce the very word nuclear as "nucular", as Bush does for criss sakes!!! In so many ways, in signs and symbols; in how we entertain ourselves, in the cults of hollywood, further entrenching our collective ignorance WE ARE STLL THE ANCIENTS... just look at the pediments and freizes the Doric columns supporting the lintels of the grand edifices in all the capitols of the West.We are still stuck in the ethos of Rome and Greece. Lovely heritage both, but we must now move on and Obama represents our best bet, here anyway, of making the first leap to the next level of becoming aware of eachother in the global sense.In essence the shackles born over hundreds of generations steeping us in insular nationalisms and tribalisms and all things suggesting belonging to local biases are at least beginning to be noticed at last. Palin, bless her beautiful feminine countenance, harkens backward in her thinking if not in her sex. It will likely be a few generations passing before we actually manifest the changes coming out of this awareness, but Obama, the symbol of the man, more than the man himself, is our best bet now moving in this direction...

back to Palin

...................Sad for us and for Palin that in every other way, via her creationism, witch exorcisms,
attempted book censoring stuff, .......on and on- her conservative views
represent some of the worst of the old male dominated model that
we need so much to dismantle if true progress is to be made in
terms of not only how the sexes in this country relate but how the
countries of mother earth or Gaia relate. The term "feminism" needs
to be broadened so that it incorporates the concept of the feminist
chi, or the "mother energy" in all of us... men and women....
......This "mother energy" was long ago expunged from both sexes,
(mostly men),when the conquering barbarian cultures and the
ancient Homeric and Hebrew, ( I am not talking about the Jews here
and this is not an anti semitic stance here), began to dominate
not only the world, but to imprison the mind into how it relates to
self and to Mother Earth.
This is why Palin wants to drill,drill, drill, as in rape, rape,
rape, thrust, thrust, thrust, dominate, dominate, dominate. This
world was given to "Man" , bequeathed to man by god as "his agent
to do his will and to use the fruits of the land etc.,

Sarah, unbeknownst to her is an inheritor of this philosophy. She believes
that "fucking the earth" is our divine right because it was given
to us, (To Adam and his male seed actually) by a male god 6 thousand years
ago and is solely for the paragon of beings to exert power and dominion over. It
was indeed mostly men that proceeded from the so called "garden"
and began this campaign of dominion over all the earth. We are
still living in this age. In this sense we are still the ANCIENTS

.......As far as Palin goes, what an irony to have such male oriented
misogyny packaged in such a petite and alluring feminine form!....
This is hard to digest for men who, from their cerebral highground, wrestle with their limbic systems






….I'm working on an essay titled "The Dream of Sarah" It is a male wet
dream desiring the best for Palin's erotic as well as cerebral enlightenment moving through time........ Sarah time travels through the ages cast out from the "garden" , and as a "fallen temptress" she takes a number of lovers and husbands, (all in the male dominant model), and finally arrives at the
the windswept- curtains billowed in window sill of Voltaire @ his writing desk at the highpoint of the French Enlightenment.
Voltaire then morphs into the libertine Casanova who looks like Fabio.They spend rapacious nights reading Sapphos poetry by candlelight, Rousseau's and
Dennis Diederots writings, Candide and all the rest. She is beginning to break as she combines the sensual beauty of Sappho's poetry with Rousseau's championing of the noble savage finally revealing herself in a sensuous striptease under Voltaire's brightly lit candlelabra. Revealing herself to voltaire and to the "Enlightenment" finally becoming truly modern by casting off these age old shackles that have been with her since the days she left paradise..

as dust gathers on her Old Testament bible

Thomas Paine, Jonathan Swift, and Sean Hanity mixin it up


This is an ongoing correspondence between 2 of the brothers Warren. Dave and Pete.
This response was answering a poem he has written based on McCain's statement referring to Obama as "that one" in the recent debate in Nashville. In reading my response back though I decided to not include Pete's poem in this essay as it took on a life of its own and pretty well makes a case for the corruption and reformation of the term "liberal" and "liberalism" as it is bandied about today on infotainment networks like FOX News.

Pete,
....Now to your thoughts and quotes from Swift and Thomas Paine, apropos of their satirical brilliance and your poem entitled"That One." Further along an imagined course, I'd bring both Swift and Paine forward to sit on a typical set w/ the renowned Sean Hannity of FOX news during one of his anti liberal
mini screeds. It would be interesting to see how Swift ,or Paine,
or Patrick Henry for that matter, would withstand Hannity's anti
liberal vitriolic screedograms... It would be evident to Paine @
the outset however,that Hannity simply has not done his
homework-that he would be taken by Paine as a talking head Torre lightweight and Paine would immediately leave the set.

Swift, however, saved by his keen sense of humor, farce, and irony, would hang in
there awhile just to see what form anti liberalism had taken these
250 years or so later. He would quickly conclude though that Hannity has
not read Thomas Hobbes,David Hume or Bishop Berkley or much of
European history at all from the Age of Reason forward. Or maybe he
might think that if Hannity had read any of these people, and
compared them to thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment like John
Locke or Adam Smith, or JS Mill, that he just did not get it. He simply
did not understand that the former thinkers were brilliant apologist with
reasoned arguments supporting the case for conservative philosophy.
And there surely were reasonable arguments defending conservative thought given the contexts of the times, with the civil and religious wars in England, and, especially, the debaucheries of the French Revolution, as cases examplar of liberalism run amok.

If he read the Scots at all,he simply did not understand how profound was the liberal idea that reimagined self determination in the hands of an enfranchised
democracy, and that this liberal and radical form became us here in the U.S.! I say reimagined because this idea had its precedence
but died in the 4'th century AD with the demise of Rome.
He simply does not get the self evident truth that we are all
children of a profoundly liberal approach to how people govern themselves.

Conservative philosophers like Hobbes for example, proclaimed more
or less that sovereignty was best placed in the safe hands of a
single monarch, or sovereign, and in exchange for relinquishing
individual freedoms, subjects would be guaranteed protection and
security by such a sovereign. Pretty sound reasoning here seems me. That was the deal . Give me the bulk of your rights to self determination and I'll protect you from your fellow subjects within under the rule of law ,and from without,
from foreign enemies of the state. All the liberal intellectual and
philosophical movements of the late 17'th century and early 18'th
flew directly in the face of this "conservative" thinking. This
movement led by John Locke and others of the Scottish
Enlightenment became the political realities and applied
structures of the later 18'th century and continues today.

Does Hannity know, (I think McCain does, but Palin surely does
not), that we are indeed the living demonstration of extremely
liberal and radical ideas. We in the surviving modern democracies
are all the children and benefactors of radically liberal thought.
What would Hannity say to this? If he'd been alive during the
revolution he'd have surely been a loyalist or a Torre. The whole
of the 18'th century, as far as the political structures it
produced, is all about overturning conservative thinking as in
monarchical rule, and risking the enfranchisement and power
granting to the "mob", to the masses, and finally framed so
beautifully, so simply, so enduringly, in the first lines of the
Constitution "WE THE PEOPLE" Up until then, all " parliamentary
constitutions" would have started thus: THE KING DECREES BY DIVINE
RIGHT THAT........ blah, blah, blah

Hannity would have likely branded Jefferson, Adams, and Paine all
dangerous liberal insurrectionists and demanded their heads on a
plate delivered up to the king.

What's so dangerous today is this idea that liberalism
conjugates out to "anti patriotism. Go back to school Sean!!!!!
It was liberalism and the guts to risk all its diverse promise that
gave us what we have today and why liberalism excercising it's measures of conservative reinstatemnet of the amendments to the constitution and the constitution itself which has been under serious assault these last 8 years
thatwill save us from this drift toward what Hobbes and Berkley, with
all their noble thinking, championed in their thoughts granting
absolute rule in the hands of a single sovereign. This drift is
happening right now with more and more power granted to the executive branch of government long before Bush.

Give me Hobbes any day over Hannity, for given the context of his birth, (he was born 3 mos. premature on the evening of the destruction of the Spanish Armada
in 1588). He was born literally in a womb of fear as his mother looked out to sea from the English coastline at the specter of the looming Armada. So, how and when he came into the world directly effected the way he thought for the rest of his life. He thought a single empowered sovereign was the only way to ensure the safest and most stable form of government. He may have been right for his context but clearly wrong in terms of the eventual best of all possible worlds ensuring security.But he would not have had the prescience then to see what has happened in the new world 300 years hence after that fateful night when tumultuous seas and wind made
quick and easy dispatch of the formidable Armada in 1588.

But Sean, Hobbes went to school in a way that we have
forgotten to go to school even if we get ourselves into the Ivy Leagues. He did his homework with thousands of hours of study and
analysis producing his brilliant work in The Leviathan, not
instant stardom and a buly pulpitauction block to hock your books and
T-shirts!!!! Because you're on fucking TV!!!! .
Poor Sean though, he is but an emblematic talking head of these sorely dumb
downed times in that he is a very narrowly educated ideologue who
is granted license to spread propaganda and calling it fair and
balanced news. It's as bad as trying to put Intelligent Design scientifically
into a biology text. Eric Severied and my Dad would puke all over H Hannity's notes each night he gets going, but each would feel so much more loss for what
has happened to the electorate and the American Mind.

Open Letter To The Prince Of Denmark


note:Italics are my open letter to Hamlet...
interspersed is a form of inter locution

Dear Hamlet,

Saw you recently at the Shakespeare Theatre's newest version of your 400 year old saga. And being in the spit zone in the wash of the foot lights, stage right, found myself in a good joust with my own ghosts about your story. Ghosts that have been haunting for some time in ways that I hardly could fathom. So, proceeding with outlandish presumption,and cathartic release, I take on not only you, but your illustrious creator as well as the 400 year literary establishment hailing you as the quintessential "modern", with particular emphasis here on your most recent apostle, Harold Bloom. And I really don’t know just why the play has troubled me so. Maybe this writing is an attempt, I guess, at gestalting some unrest in me.

The resulting essay begins my own ridiculously audacious task of unfolding a counter factual story that borrows from the original quasi historical "Amleth" of 12'th century Denmark which likely draws on the Ur-Hamlet myths as far back as Roman times. My revision attempts to save you from the bloodbath of your final scene and touches, in a distant remove, on this current Muslim/Christian predicament we find ourselves in. My allegory merges these 2 traditions by bringing the Muslim Philosopher Averroes and your namesake, "Amleth",a Dane, together when he is very young. Very tall order indeed. But, interestingly, from an historical standpoint, both Averroes of Andalucia, Spain, and Amleth of Denmark were relative contemporaries.

So, your tale has been laced into the canonic memes-the remebering DNA of our Western ethos for some time now, and my issues with it are fundamental ones taking opposition at the content as much as the plot of the play at some primal level. It is not lost on me that this is a grossly presumptuous assault.But if my gall provokes you along to see just how preposterous my insult is to so illustrious a figure as "The Bard" representative of the species, then so be it. I am mad at Shakespeare and madder at Homer, but we won't get into that now! This is my blog and so far it has essentially served as an echo chamber for my own plaintive cries under a taciturn moon and have largely gone comment less save some sweet cousins, a few friends and myself. Satisfying the mean sensibilities of some broad audience of readers is obviously not my intent.

....Ah well, perhaps posterity awaits some response after this author is housed in some other realm. Anyway, I thank the reader in advance if you have the pluck to make it to the end of my rant. The writing gets much stronger as it advances.This is a drama and serves as a play within a play within my internal drama.Please have at my hubris here and see if any of my "on guards" to Shakespeare, or to Bloom, or to the literary establishment excites some turbulence unrustled in you that I have brought some flux to. If nothing else at all, if I have done this in some way than I consider my efforts successful...




.........So, there we were in the spit zone at the Shakespeare theatre in DC, recently, w/ your juices flying out at us through the beams of the foot lights like some rite where holy water is flung out into the congregation to anoint the faithful… Well Hamlet, not so much you, but more your creator, and what we have done with your story since causes this unrest… I think my anger comes at your exalted stature in the west more than your personal undoing in the tale of which you were the key architect by the way, so don’t spit on me and just get a hold of yourself now,and it is your ghost and not your father's that I invite to haunt some frightful muse out of me is what I found myself thinking that night...

It seems too long that the lessons of your story have been dictated as classic dogmas w/out reproach at some fundamental level. Well, just what the hell am I trying to say here? Stay with it and I hope it will begin to make some sense.
That your character is centered as the seminal personality in the western canon,embodying the core essences, the Freudian conflicts, the Christian archetypes, and all that stuff …… Is this how you see yourself by the way? Are your soliloquies the first whispers from the interior recesses of an aware subconscious come to light, creating the first solitary thinker of the renaissance????…… Well, and this goes to you, Mr. Bloom, have we forgotten Cicero, Christ, Socrates, Augustine and so many others? Here we have Hamlet creating a western prototype against the backdrops of country, family, father/ mother, and all the mix that puts together and unravels personality.

Mr.Bloom’s wildly amplified contention that Shakespeare’s genius found some essential grail in you Hamlet, his character that went further than anything before or since, and that we need go no further than you Hamlet to understand the core elements of modern human nature- of not only western nature but some universal constant as well….. Looking for a fire break here Harold !!!!
Here is an outlandish quote from Bloom:, "at least to me anyway, I cannot think of another literary dramatic character who has anything like Hamlet's sheer intelligence, who is so original a mind, and who is actually endowed by Shakespeare with a kind of authorial consciousness ... so that you can start quoting Hamlet the way you quote Nietzsche, or Emerson, or Freud, or Montaigne on almost any subject," he said.
"So he really has a kind of cognitive music that he hears all the time, and he is in a perpetual state of change because of it, because he is, as Dr. Samuel Johnson first said, the most serious and volatile of Shakespearean protagonists." .
……So, following my own muse, and “cognitive music“- which is a sublime term Mr. Bloom- I feel I must chase something down here or it will always remain fugitive and troubling to me as so much is in this western Pelagia in which we find ourselves does. hey hamlet, Pelagia is not a word… don’t think so anyway…. but comes from the word pelagic which encompasses the billions of planktonic tons suspended in the oceans and all the ocean water that this stuff is suspended in) - I like it anyway, how about you?

Maybe you can enlighten from your 400 yearstill blood stained slumber here, but I do feel that there is some unified cohesion, we are still distant from capturing intelligibly, that ties in much of our iconic identification with classic model parables such as your tale Mr. Hamlet, that weave themselves somehow into the collective morality fields we all are affected by, if not justifying then illuminating the things we do as a nation or as individuals or political entities; perhaps this is an element of what troubles me about how you decide to deal with all those slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that are your undoing- and drawn out broader, perhaps there is some connection to the way this nation, this “Elsinore” wields itself now as a colossus of an empire losing all its sensitivity, and in some way this story, or how it is interpreted anyway… how Henry IV and others, most notably the Homeric Myths,play some baseline part in this watered down kinder/ gentler form of hegemonic conquest that America finds itself in...
... yes, remotely distant associations perhaps to tie to you Hamlet, or maybe no connection at all but for what my synapses conjure…. Who knows?…. It would take 2 lifetimes of work to flesh out , and for a trucker who finds his therapy in the movement of “landscape parallax”, I just don’t have the time but for these brief touches…..

So,allow me my own undoing of you and a retelling that has the likes of the great Muslim philosopher Averoes who saves you by his early training from the grave slings and arrows of fate you must endure in adulthood. Averroes, a real historic figure who actually lived in 13’th century cosmopolitan Andalucía, Spain. Your father, the king, sees a precocious and head strong son in development, and knows the heir apparent needs some wise guidance, some teacher who can bring out the best in you. b He feels he himself has failed the kingdom in some way because he lacks the deep wisdom and keen intelligence required to be a good philosopher/ king sovereign. He sees great potential in you though, a potential far greater than his own, and, for the sake of Elsinore, he wants to bring you up in the most liberal and open way he can.

He hears of this great philosopher teacher Averroes who is an advisor to the Muslim caliphate in far off Cordova , Spain, among other things , and whose knowledge and passions are more ecumenical and scholarly, as in Aristotelian scholarly, than religious. Though he is Muslim, he spends much of his time and scholarship translating the newly rediscovered in the west original works of Aristotle, into the common tongue. So, here he is in the middle of the 12’th century in the Muslim and Jewish capitol of Andalucía Spain, rediscovering the Greek legacy during the golden era lost to the west during the dark ages when the Roman church decided that all knowledge but what god left us in the bible was heretical. The king wants to expose you to the broadest spectrum of learning available in Europe and thinks Averroes is among the most liberally educated and broadminded man in all the land. So, off you go to Andalucía for a 3 yr sabbatical. And it is from this exposure in early life that a very different story unfolds in how you deal with all these fateful slings and arrows in later life. Needless to say , you are not riven w/ the impulse to revenge though these things form an acute torpor in you...

And so it goes in my version where this Muslim saves Amleth from Shakespeare’s final bloodied scene where he asks just to be remembered as we have all these yrs. later baptized in his own blood and the blood of his foes.By the way, this Muslim, Averroes, was perhaps the central figure in reintroducing the western mind to its cultural artistic, and historic roots, thus seeding the renaissance… (one wonders if Bush is aware of this)… one also wonders how Bush might respond to the question of who Aristotle was and how he,(Bush), can be compared to his pupil Alexander in some way and when did he live?? Thus at the seedling stage we find Averroes before the classical rendition or flowering that takes place in Florence that gets all the historical notice --- especially w/ the translation and interpretation on Aristotle that Averoes did. This Averoes is a much underrated link in world history I am thinking and that is why I have Amleth under his intellectual and more important , his ethical guidance. When I visited Cordova recently, I went to see his statue which does not command much focus , but for the pigeons lighting upon the noble head and arms,on the outside of the old mosque walls. Interestingly, even Christian Spain today hardly notes this guy who essentially brought back Aristotle from the shadows of the dark ages. If meetings w/ remarkable men in time travel could happen he’d be near the top of my list!!!!


To me, in today’s world, Hamlet, this touting of your character is a specie of danger if you are accepted as a parity, as an accurate composite of the deepest elements of human nature; of all our natures. Hamlet,you blindly stab through the curtains to kill an innocent man, and a good one , and then hardly stops to ponder this grossly rash act you have just committed…. only commenting that Polonius was a windbag … not seeing how great the impact would be on the love of your life by blindly killing the father of Ophelia even… where were the noble lines forthcoming from Shakespeare that sees the real tragedy of this behind the curtain killing ? Incredulous and incredible missed opportunity here for your creator, if you ask me to accept that this is a seminal figure in our common emotional makeup, and at the deepest levels we are all in some way implicated because you personify our true nature. And yet this seems to be the accepted dogma because it has come down from on high from Shakespeare initially???, I’m not so sure of this …… then Harold Bloom and all this literary legacy from which he borrows…… This could be compared to a president who blindly acts out of solipsists self absorbed terms and invades countries willy nilly to avenge the father‘s unrealized threats from the tyrant Moor….. Or you could also be drawn up as the quintessential tragic case history of the totally self absorbed sociopath if transposed into another setting another time…. If you are so aware of this inner nature, as Bloom describes in you, of your preternatural hold of your own native soul and the core soul of human behavior, then how might this keen sense awareness combined w/ supreme intelligence have delivered you from this blood bath?…. You reek of the extreme elements of tragic murdering illness at the runaway periphery, and not the core elements of common nature or behavior in humans seems me … at least as I feel my own humanity and observe day to day in others….

END OF LETTER TO HAMLET

Though, no doubt, granting Shakespeare’s genius, the fates in his tragic drama did deliver up to Hamlet the gravest of chanced slings and arrows, what w/ an uncle who kills his father with his mother’s complicity… it does not get much more deprave than this. His reactions though, precisely because he is presumably preternaturally aware of their deepest motives, suggest the highest degree of premeditated murder with exquisite forethought and malice. The play within a play only further dramatizes this acute awareness. The foreshadowing of this keen foresight in Hamlet’s device within a play is devious enough, but to recklessly, and with fatal abandon, stab through the curtain blindly at Polonius is beyond redemption of any kind seems me, unless one forgives temporary insanity, as Shakespeare may be trying to evoke here, and hopes that the audience may sympathize. Bloom maintains that Hamlet’s is the keenest of intelligence ever conceived in the mind of man. Preposterous Impostor I say! And if this is the case, I tremble for our species fate.

Intelligence though, if it is to be a global measure of character, moving from the rhythms of some sublime “cognitive music” as Bloom states, must include a connection with and a sense of control over those deep impulses that have removed us in fits and starts from our ancient stone hearths spattered with the "other's" blood and into some semblance of ascending decency. Hamlet, rather than the “proto modern,” harkens back precipitously with sword and dagger, and any other tool of aggression, including emotional and physical abuse to his mother and to Ophelia his supposed true love by the way….. harkens back to these blood drenched hearth stones of our common antiquity. So, if anything, through this breakdown, Hamlet shows us how far we have come from the maw and shadows of the cave, and perhaps how far we can fall if we abandon what millennia of trial and error has taught us at the species level. Perhaps this can be posited as a definition of madness though, and why this diametric opposite in his character is so extremely conflicted between presence of mind and execution of action and at the same time so supremely aware. Yes, perhaps Shakespeare, and not his character coming alive on the parchment at the playwright’s desk, is keenly aware of this and it is Bloom who has created so much intellectual din to obscure this nut.

On the contrary, what makes his character so compelling is how much he abandons the joys and lessons of his youth- after being born on Yorick’s back so lovingly, finding a morbid fascination from the pits with his beloved jester’s skull as a foreshadowing of his own impending skulduggery. He seems far more akin to Cro Magnon than the first proto human renaissance man, as Bloom exalts. Hamlet’s mind may indeed be transcendent, but his actions are case exposes in retrocede dislocation. And so, ultimately, how is the ultimate fidelity of mind to be measured or valued as it relates to the actions sprung of its thoughts? And perhaps this is the root object of Shakespeare’s tragedy by the way- and what I have missed in this critique . Though his pitiable tale endears us to him, and his suffering charm, it is through the thinnest veneer of Shakespeare’s sublime language through his character that we are seduced …. If all the elements of the plot in the tale are the same, yet mediocre language reported the story to us, how would it play or would it play at all at the Folger theater 500 yrs. later? So, I guess I’m saying that we should be more wary of sublime language in its ability to seduce as an art than we are, for example, of music to do the same. One hopes that each might come to his or her own reckoning that would involve far less blood should such terrible fates chance fall our lives.


I do not feel , as the cliché directs us, that there is a seething madness or anger just under the surface in all of us that civilization with its attendant laws and customs keep a thin veil over … and that Hamlet personifies, through his actions, our deepest impulses of aggression, despite how Freud might applaud the loudest here; but that there is a preponderance of evidence more telling and proven if one just observes in their daily lives that admits the silent record of untold trillions of benign deeds committed daily worldwide through millennia defining our deepest natures of cooperation with far more open to light observation than these deep theories of aggression suggest of our common human nature , that there is an essence of daily verified goodness and willing cooperation which plays more of a constant rhythm in our everyday behavior -that perhaps tunes into some ethical harmonic strumming some chord in the double helix that tunes into some perhaps profundo continuo scale pervasive in the cosmos….

…….Well that does not say much really beyond the poetry of this wild notion that intuit’s the ethical base to our nature and how it might follow the laws of nature and evolution just as the law of gravity keeps the moon and earth in exquisite equipoise….. no I guess not, but especially in the west w/ all our recent revival of manifest destiny in the world under Bush, we need some new projected models of morality that needs to slip the surly bonds of the Hebrew Bible, or the Homeric Myths, of which Hamlet may be seen as a latter day descendant, though brilliantly depicted by Shakespeare; yes , some umbilical severing is needed here that offers some promise of becoming, some intuitive jumping of the gap….. Perhaps this sources my plaintive cry that assails this character of Shakespeare’s and now, Bloom’s recreation and wildly overblown enhancement of…. this Hamlet ….… assails this “Hamlet” as not the “proto modern” at all, but, rather, the quintessential opposite -as compared to beings from other worlds for example- as there is no “control” group to compare our own nature really, despite how close our DNA matches chimps- these beings, who warp through galactic worm holes peering in on our experiment from their cosmic light born ships , who have millions of years of civilization might be “moderns” - but rather this character of Hamlet, enlivened brilliantly on Shakespeare’s mother tongue, shows us just how ancient he is still, and, ultimately, and more importantly, by our identification and fascination w/ him still on his 400‘th birthday, just how ancient we still are.

We have so far to go in departure from his last blood stained and poisoned scene where, essentially we still find ourselves if you ponder on what entertains us on all these screens , and what about these atomic swords and daggers of starburst death we still have hidden in the earth to protect us from the many “others” found outside “Elsinore’s” walls. In what way dear Hamlet have we remembered you?…….not until now, this moment, through the process of this writing am I beginning to source out the origins of this unrest I’ve felt about this Hamlet and how we supposed “moderns “ can be reflected in his image and likeness. Only at the distant edges , in the extreme situation ethics, at the periphery can I see any kinship whatsoever despite your central fixing Mr. Bloom or even you Mr. Shakespeare. So, on guard, and touche!!..... softly though

Epilog

I maintain that Hamlet represents more the periphery, the anomalies run amok of some of our volatile extreme natures unharnessed and, though brilliant in its capacity at self seeing, still loses to his baser impulses and goes out of control into pathologia or some such experiential trauma that dislocates the cerebrum and lets the bull of the limbic out to full run in the insensitive dark, and not just the parts that civilized order has suppressed in the character or is reflected in us for that matter as Bloom wants to build.

Yes, no doubt, of course, it is a wonderful play, all this is a given premise and the reason I feel so provoked to answer in some way according to my own muse of which I value highly. But is it the tectonic starting point where metamorphic slurry, still soft , becomes the granitic character of western man post renaissance and his public and private conscious, as Bloom maintains,? Well I don’t know at all but frankly, I think its much ado bout nothing and that sometimes titanic intellectual eccentrism combined with a force of charismatic will, which Bloom’s rotundity surely encompasses, combine to create a Falstaffian sense of dogma around a subject, as I think Bloom has created around this character Hamlet.

In defense and in deference to Bloom here, though, my theories and their fleshed out expressions in my takeoff here, are based largely on intuitive leaps, shallow and superficial as they might be , skimming at best with perhaps some delving into other related “fields,” and not serious classical scholarship as Bloom has done throughout his career. So, my hat is off to him for he has done far more work into this study, as prosaic and classical as it may be, than I will ever do, and this is a reaction to his prodigious work, so, it all starts w/ Shakespeare, of course, but it Bloom to which the greater part of this reactionary inspiration I am indebted to for his florid covering of this supposed seminal character.

“The Wal-Martization of the Public Mind and the passing of the "Red Barn in the Field"

Thoreau, quoting Emerson, said that all men lead lives of quiet,
[solitary] desperation. Most likely he was speaking to those most kindred to his philosophical ilk,those who believed the examined life, though perhaps more lonely, was still more worthy of pursuit than one of convention. But precisely what he meant by the "examined" life, and just what "pursuits" distinguish this life from an unexamined one of perpetual sleep, rests w/ his perpetual slumber on some hillside green in Concord, MA.

But Thoreau, in his Walden solitude, on his solo walks, was not left wanting for companions during his sojourn in the Walden woods. He conceded as much in the many jaunty passages of his literary classic. And one sometimes wonders how the company of such taciturn companions inspired such a clear and cogent view of the rapidly developing market imperatives and the knawing sense of disconnection with nature he felt went w/ the modernity of his times.

The sentiment of this essay borrows from some of his somber prognostications regarding the seemingly insensate march of market imperatives that, as in his day, seem to justify a singular ethic by subjugating all other considerations save the bottom line. In his day he chose the railroad- the "Iron Horse" as the looming specter- the imposing symbol of these inexorable market forces. By comparative analogy, this essay chooses the preeminent presence of Wal-Mart as its whipping boy.

Seems not such a great stretch, projecting forward, based on the gaining momentum of its exponential growth , that Wal*Mart is destined for increasing magnitude in its formative force exerted not only on the American landscape, but the greater world as well.. There is a much greater transcendent possibility unfolding about Wal-Mart, the world we find ourselves in, our current so called leader, his electorate, (to which he is but a composite emblem), and the eventual para mutual conjunction between “Sam’s Club,”the US government, and the rest of the world to which this conjunction considers not only its labor force but its client base buying fodder as well.

Sadly, we are in the final stages of the of the 2’nd “Modern
World,( at least the second modern movement of the western world that is). We are in a transitional gap of sorts, a gloaming maybe. The 1’st modern world being Greece and Rome. This 2’nd, starting w/ the renaissance through the 16’th century w/ the likes of such thought germinals as Francis Bacon, Martin Luther, Isaac Newton and, as just a few examples Kant, Locke, Hegel, Marx. These epochs seem to be curving downward toward a slow extinguishmen now; and as the receding lights of the scientific and philosophical Enlightenment flicker out, a new ordering principle supplants the quintessential distillates of this Enlightenment and all its diverse champions. Sounds pretty dire but look around and you'll see much evidence of this downspiral.

We currently find ourselves suspended in the gloaming, caught in the gap at the interface between the 2’nd and 3’rd historical epochs, (well, human epochs anyway).
New forms arise that fill out the structure of this new epoch. New
Shivas destroying the old, heralding in the New “kinder and gentler
world order.” An early commercial prototype of these usurping forms would be
Ford’s assembly line concept - but the extrapolated full bore blowout of
this concept is: ta daaa… Wal*Mart. Wal*Mart is mass assembly line production, distribution and sales writ on the universal scale. Ford’s concept had a single product line: cars. The Wal*Mart Conglomerate, (a new word needs to be
found here), will soon market everything from toothpaste and
produce, to educational concepts, and modes of thought to boot.

Just beyond the discernable horizon, Wal-Mart Pavilions, (under a franchised
out sourced pseudonym of course), might encompass huge tracts of space in a
Blade Runner style cement, glass and plastic dioramas.
Sadly, the “Red Barn in the Field,” the Greek Revival mansion in the hill and
dale green.. all have to go to make way for these "Global
Pavilions". And sadly, the independent minded thinker must also be
wary of the back hoe and macadam.

Dwight D Eisenhower’s forewarned portents on the Military/ Industrial
complex showed a seer’s prescience. The industrial era has
essentially merged with the Information/Commercial epoch. The
Military/ Industrial and the Information /Commercial are, in kind,
monolithic relatives. The prima facie mien, as yet not fully
developed, is recognized early on in the countenance of the budding
colossus Wal_Mart. Not so much this particular retail Wal- Mart,
but the concept “Wal-Mart” as a means of product and service purveying. Sam
himself had no vision of the hegemonic promised land on this scale,
but there is no stopping it now... Frankenstein is at large in a
frozen wasteland.

These Pavilions will be total immersion experiences. Every nuanced
subtlety of the buyer’s limbic system will be accounted for and
catered to. For example, there will be schools w/in the Pavilion
Compound that invite children and their parents to “choose” the
brand of “Evolutionary Theory” they wish to learn. Over here the
10,000 year old Earth created in six days by the divine Patriarch
w/ the arcade game that has you shuttling all the paired animals
into Noah‘s.. or maybe it will be Sam’s or George’s Arc. Over
there, the Godless model called Darwinism, that suggests chance and
random occurrence.. These out moded forms of the "old science" will
amount to a form of market heresy. So this particular school of
thought, ( Darwinian Evolution) will likely reach extinction in a
few generations…of its own accord, by its own lack of scientific
merit of course.. (planned obsolescence)
( strange irony here as that it was social Darwinism and laizzes faire economics-that formed the first arguments underpinning capitalism raison d'etre in the late 19'th century). There is a malignant Gulliver that blindly roams the land looking
for labensraum- for space to expand. This Gulliver is us, this
clamoring culture in mass consumption….

This is one reason I do what I do… The Red Barn in the Field is a
beautiful and dying thing. All who sense the early portents, whose
minds are not yet “Martinized” should be reading Gibbon’s “Decline
And Fall Of The Roman Empire” and Thoreau’s Walden … End of rant. Care to join me on a run while a few Red Barns are left?

J.S. MILL, WAR AND PEACE, AND THE IMMATERIAL SOLUTION.


John Stuart Mill said , paraphrasing: "A far worse state than war would be a world where there was nothing worth fighting for"... Well, for a philosopher whose primary utilitarian themes insist on the greatest good served for the greatest number of people, I'm not so sure his apathetic aphorism would hold water today. In fact, just a minor change in syntax, and shifting the intellectual perspective just slightly, produces a neutralizing twist on this rationalized ethos for war. Mill, living today, might even see this statement for the historical anachronism it has become -at least when applied to this particular element of his "greatest good served" philosophy.

Considering rational futures based on how profoundly different, and "trigger hair sensitive" our world has become since his time -especially post Hiroshima- then his philosophical water falls through like a sieve. When the overall consequences are multi magnitudes greater on the world scale, wars today become sheer illogical mass madness.

Yet,why do political leadership structures still have tens of thousands of nuclear warheads entrenched all over the world? And why, when all coherent systems of logic are applied to the question-why does this illogic fleet away to infinitely regressive paradox/absurdum? The rhetorical question begs: why does such an absurd state still remain the status quo? What might Mill put in place when his greatest good served axiom is applied to the question of war's implications today.

It's at this point-a point where a seemingly paradoxical impasse has been reached- that collective solutions might be sought at the "immaterial" level-figuratively immaterial anyway. Going inward as a world community to search for clues to the myriad configuration of neurons in the human mind for example is one way, perhaps the only way to salvation- a journey deep into the neuronal tissues of human behaviors collectively as well as individually to study this "mind attachment" as it relates to country/nation/ religion and search for how these concepts are biologically and somatically interwoven into notions of freedom/rights/liberty/and moral alignment w/ god in the "minds" of human beings. This is what "going inward" means. Can we truly call ourselves the paragon of thinking animals, Mr Mill, if we don't at least try for this immaterial "non war" imperative as a sheer survival strategy when making crucial decisions?


Power brokers on the world scale ie., politicians, political theorists, industrial hegemons, those who are empowered to make such crucial decisions in the future must realize that a fundamental sea change occurred at Hiroshima. The splitting of the atom should have come w/some cosmic "how to survive" rules of responsibility. Sadly we are left on our own here.

A certain historical depth perception is required here; an understanding that comprehends that the harnessing of the force holding stars together changed everything all in that instant at the Trinity sight in New Mexico, when Robert Oppenheimer whispered his famous/infamous quote from Dante, "I am death become, destroyer of worlds". Technologically, Hiroshima was further from Dresden, Tokyo, Normandy or the London Raids than were all of these from Homer's Trojan wars.

This depth perception becomes self evident when past wars are understood in their historical contexts before the invention of the atom bomb. There reconstructions and Marshall plans and the like. On a global scale of warfare today, where Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), are the stakes, aftermath means essentially mass destruction,cultural deconstruction, and starting all over again. What once might have substantiated utilitarian argument for world wars before Hiroshima, become no longer tenable as "diplomatic tool solutions". No longer tenable in the modern world w/ a hair trigger's capacity to release unimaginable megaton forces that perhaps a single individual in a public place can unleash.

Historically, the "Hiroshima Moment" is where the critical juncture must be sensed. Based on the intuitive understanding of the profundity of what Hiroshima represented, world leadership must correspondingly break from aggressive default positions inherited from the past. It is from this intellectual beholding - one that understands and utilizes how fissionable "material" is held together that the counter intuitive "immaterial" solution begins to be vitalized.Going inward may be the only way to emerge from the labyrinth so to speak.

With all its attendant high tech efficiencies, the advent of nuclear bombs has drastically altered the traditional theatres of war. In reality, there are no "fronts" today. There may be hostile borders such as N Korea and antagonists nations sharing borders, but there are no tactical arrangements of battalions, or massive armies amassing at various locations-none of these old strategies apply when megaton devices can be hurled over the poles at supersonic speeds, or concealed in the backpacks of "tourists". We need new modes of thought that break radically w/ the past as the atom bomb radically and totally changes the means and more importantly, the consequences of all out war.

We need pragmatists like Thomas Hobbes and Mill, and others of like mind to draw upon in these discussions trying to figure out where we are headed as a "thinking race".The arguments must be rigorous, and founded in pragmatism, not sentiment, if it will have the power of logic to captivate those who will assume positions to affect a change.

Past peace movements,essentially reactive movements against aggressive moves, have been primarily idealistic or altruistic/ moral/religious by nature. These plaintive arguments- ones that came out of "Frankfurt School" , or utopian aspirations on "Man Becoming" ideals,for example, must find proactive, non reactive based philosophical structure.

Leadership structures, entrusted with nation state security, with its seeming cultural inherencies, must be radically reevaluated from the standpoint of what constitutes national interest "protective measures" today. In the past, more was always better. More was always safer . More guns, more bombs,cannons, men to fight etc. The inward, non material solution seeks more as well; more inward enlightenment.. more illumination on what the mushroom cloud portends if it remains an "icon tool" in our mental arsenals. ----

The weak and short sighted resignation that wars have always existed therefore must be intrinsic to human nature and thus will always exist is no longer just an idle position to hold, but, if held universally, has only a catastrophic end point as its terminal expression in today's world.

More precisely put as a question: what goes down in the myriad connections of the brain of a terrorist that compels an override of the most basic of all instincts, that to survive, and what causes - by acts of asserted will- what causes him/her to kill themselves and thousands of others in the process by flying airplanes into buildings? These 19 individuals were compelled by "jihad", compelled to "war"- even if symbolic in nature- killing thousands of innocents, (if "infidels"can be considered innocents in the minds of the jihadists), including themselves in the process. What kind of "scorched earth" religious zealotry has taken in the minds of such individuals? What remarkable constellation of organic molecules in the folded labyrinths of the "terrorist's" minds could propel such action? If barely affecting the colossus of the American superstructure, they surely succeeded in getting the world's attention from what these aural structures of mind compelled.

Think of it, what were the main issues in the tissues of the minds of those who flew those planes into the twin towers? If just one reason can be cited, maybe going to heaven by killing thousands of innocent infidels seems close to the heart of it. The question is, just what essentials from the environment and what from the uniqueness of each man's gray matter might have compelled them to commit such horrendous acts?
And, when in the past could a band of only 19 individuals unleash such a magnitude of powerful destruction.?
9/11 was just a relatively small but ghastly prelude to what is theoretically and practically possible and probable in the future if some form of "inward solution" is not sought now. Aside from the peopled conspiracy leading up to the final act, could 19 individuals alone have caused anywhere near this magnitude of destruction in any time in history?. Impossible. Theoretically and practically impossible, as far as the history we are presently aware of. Not so today. This meager number of persons with great capacity for incredible destruction is the world we inhabit today. It is for this practical reason that another inward, and immaterial approach must be sought and fast.
And this crucial power released to manpower required ratio must be understood by policymakers today. More and more destructive power can now be released by fewer and fewer individuals in smaller and smaller packages. The curve indicates this downsizing trend just as the first computers and their power capacities have gone from devices that required 2 large rooms to what today are essentially hand held palm devices .
Think of how many individuals and volumes of material and how much power released over a period of time was required for the Dresden raids during WW2 for example. Magnitudes of power, coordination, and effort in for a corresponding yield of power out over an extended period of time. Now imagine 1 person w/ one easily concealed tactical nuclear warhead who detonates on the steps of the U. S. capitol and instantly obliterates hundreds of thousands of lives.
How much power, effort, coordination in to power yield out was required for this single individual ? How has the ratio radically changed since Dresden? But from Dresden to Hiroshima the world changed radically and irrevocably. And from Hiroshima to now it is only an efficiency, concealability, and power increase factor that creates the Armageddon scenarios we are talking about.

What might Mill conclude today when applying his greatest good served for the greatest number when arguing for just war rationales? Nothing holds up to the old arguments for just war on the world scale, or any scale at all for that matter. Nothing holds up anymore and everything changed when we discovered how to harness the power that holds stars together.
After the force holding stars together-what is essentially a material force- was finally understood and harnessed as weapons of mass destruction, then the only solution preventing self immolation eventually by the "discoverers" of this force seem to tend toward inward "immaterial" solutions.

To the extent that Mill's statement seems more a national psychological assessment describing accumulated ennui such that might describe Rome in decline for example , then it becomes apparent that an earned decadence cultured from within over time would create such apathy that nothing would be worth defending from this malaise- this stupor of decadence- a place and mind set that America seems arguably to be drifting towards then I'd agree, and consider his statement an applicable conundrum in that any society that had slid to this level of decadence, where the premise maintains that nothing is conceived as dear enough in the "nation collective" to be worthy of armed defense. That this society has likely, in descent, done moral violence unto itself in some manner-- and suggest that historically, cultures that imprint into the social code, the valor and romance of war, especially those of conquest, commit this moral violence, and have already begun the deconstruction process from within anyway. So Mr. Mill, as you roll over in your grave, let's put a positive twist with a small subtraction and addition on your aphorism…..

War is ugly, [so] a far [better] state would be a World where all nations held in unison that no conflict was worth warring for. This state would be called Peace........ Yes, Mr. Mill……… this would be called Peace .

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Freedom from Hate Ideologies,The Straining of the Melting Pots- a trucker's parallax view

We pick up the action here w/ edited excerpts from a well circulated e-mail concerning a particular Muslim proclamation of faith under what is known as "Sharia Law", and what the Australian government has done to address concerns over this professed Muslim dogma. This e-mail has circulated around the internet and found its way to me. Long harboured views on this topic-not necessarily Sharia Law- but the Muslim faith in America, found some release in answering this e-mail...
All excerpts from the e-mail are in italics. The answer below the italics are my words...

"I wish that the U.S.would get it's act together and make a stand like
Australia apparently has done about the problem of radical Muslims"...

...Muslims who want to live under Islamic Sharia law were told on Wednesday to
get out of Australia, as the government targeted radicals in a bid to head
off potential terror attacks. A day after a group of mainstream Muslim
leaders pledged loyalty to Australia and her Queen at a special meeting with
Prime Minister John Howard, he and his Ministers made it clear that
extremists would face a crackdown..

Treasurer Peter Costello, seen as heir apparent to Howard, hinted that some
radical clerics could be asked to leave the country if they did not accept
that Australia was a secular state, and its laws were made by parliament.
"If those are not your values, if you want a country which has Sharia law or
a theocratic state, then Australia is not for you"!


...Brendan Nelson later told reporters that Muslims who did not
want to accept local values should "clear off. Basically people who don't
want to be Australians,and who don't want to live by Australian values and
understand them, well then, they can basically clear off,he said.


..."This idea of Australia being a multicultural community has served only to dilute our sovereignty and our national identity. As Australians, we have our own
culture, our own society, our own language and our own lifestyle." "This
culture has been developed over two centuries of struggles, trials and
victories by millions of men and women who have
sought freedom".......
"We speak mainly ENGLISH, not Spanish, Lebanese, Arabic,
Chinese, Japanese, Russian,
or any other language. Therefore, if you wish to
become part of our society,
Learn the language!"

"Most Australians believe in God. This is not some
Christian, right wing, political push, but a fact, because Christian men
and women, on Christian principles, founded this nation, and this is clearly
documented. It is certainly appropriate to display it on the walls of
our schools.....
...because God is part of our culture."
"We will accept your beliefs, and will not question
why. All we ask is that
you accept ours, and live in harmony and peaceful enjoyment with us." "If
the Southern Cross offends you, or you don't like "A
Fair Go", then you should seriously consider a move to another part of
this planet. >> > culture, but do not force it on others.....

"This is OUR COUNTRY, OUR LAND, and OUR LIFESTYLE, and we will allow you
every opportunity to enjoy all this. But once you
are done complaining, whining, and griping about Our Flag, Our Pledge, Our
Christian beliefs, or our Way of Life, I highly encourage you take
advantage of one other great
Australian freedom, 'THE RIGHT TO LEAVE'....


....Maybe if we circulate this amongst ourselves, American citizens will find
the backbone to start speaking and voting the same truths!!


Interesting points here all

Should any one group, religious, ethnic, racial, whatever- living in one of these open democracies be asked to renounce any particular set of codes or beliefs newly introduced - like Sharia law for example- brought from their respective countries or religions of origin, and pledge allegiance to these new values? A difficult ethical and practical question for a country that espouses and was founded upon the principle of religious toleration and pluralism; but one that gets to the crux of the matter of why essential religious divisions are so much more dangerous to all humanity today than at any time in human history.


Yet, perhaps not ironically, the formative elements that establish these national values @ inception,over time might become the roots of rabid xenophobic exclusion w/ all its narrow biases determining which group values should be subscribed to as the seminal ones required to pledge allegiance in order to be counted among the "belongers.
Just who are the true indigenous peoples of America- and of Australia for that matter-if they were not the original Amer-Indians or the Aborigine peoples- and why is it that their ancient hunting/gathering values have been subsumed and not included in this current collection of so called American or Australian values? This is an opening aside to the issues addressed here, but it ties in an historic way.

All the established democracies, the U.S. and Australia in particular in this case, have gone through their historical earning and learning curves where the disenfranchised, persecuted and economically isolated peoples all over Europe came together under a new banner of a more open society of laws established by either parliaments or congress... but when these peoples first arrived after the original founding stock of Scotch/English/German, they were considered “the other”- a new breed of European, Irish, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese- arriving later than these first settlers claiming original rights to establish these a priori emblematic values. So, by turn, all these second and third wave immigrants went through rites of passage in persecution and exclusion, etc., much the same way as the Muslims endure today...

"So just what we must say and do today to be most effective in ensuring safety and civil society for all"?

The difference today is that instead of nationality or race being the base of xenophobic prejudice,(although these reasons are still very potent ), it's essentially religion... religion is even displacing race as the single most volatile divisive factor . ...... A sharp irony here in that one of the radical departures from Monarchical rule, written into the constitutions of these seminal democracies of the 18'th and 19'th centuries, in America and Australia, (have not read the Australian constitution, so this is assumed), was religious toleration; was the conceptual embracing of tolerant pluralism as a keystone to building a vibrant system of how converging peoples meet in the melting pot, and, through the intercourse of their respective diversities, how they collaboratively thrive.

My question is this : What are the true, intrinsic "American Values”; the true Australian ones? Who decides what these values should be at any given time in the fluid move of trends through history? And just who lies outside these "accepted norms"? Who gets to decide these standards? Do the descendant progeny of the first conquering settlers get to decide? Would they be the Scotch/ English settlers? The great thing about the formation of America, (and Australia too I'd assume), is the great latitude of acceptance they seemed to write into the spirit and letter of their founding charters -the championing of Pluralism and tolerance of the new group, the new language, the new concepts, the new religion.

To bring it into present day America, do the values of the current U.S. president w/ his beliefs that his interests for this nation coincide w/ a provident Christian god who intends to protect this nation, and this nation only, speak for the composite values of some absolute collection of American ideals???
Truth be told, many of the most influential founders of this country, (America), were Deists, Jefferson and Franklin come to mind as standouts. They did not believe in a provident Christian god that heard the prayers of a single nation and answered in kind preferentially toward that nation thereby disadvantaging other nation's not under this god's protective affections.
The issue of the Muslim moving into the heretofore established realms of Scotch English/ German/ French colonies is basically driven by fear and ignorance and the inborn wariness of the "other", in this case “the dark swarthy Moor“. The problem is almost insoluble in that colliding forces seem to be in late stage advance where radical religious fundamentalism, whether it's Christian or Muslim lie opposed in diametric philosophical planes and seem destined for a terrible reckoning, a clash of culture and religion that threatens the entire cohesion of modern society. (read Sam Huntington’s classic essay “The Clash of Civilizations”), of which 9/11 was just an opening salvo.



This question has no easy answer. All religions that claim a provident god w/ “his” vested set of rules speaking for their interests only, juxtaposed as they are across the globe on bloody borders, now pose the gravest threat to humanity other than do asteroids or natural disasters such as global warming . The main ones presently posing this threat are Muslim, Christian, and Hindu... probably in that order.

It seems a reasonable position to contend that any set of beliefs, whether they are religious, political, economic, philosophical... whatever, that actively pursues and encourages gross violence and terrorism as a means to gain their ends must be dealt with in accordance w/ the practical laws of civil society across the world. These laws should be universals though, writ large on the world scale..... Transcendent Kantian Imperatives that are not preferentially tainted by concepts of "National Character" or individual Nation interest.
It seems that if one set of faith based beliefs, and the violent actions these beliefs cause, appears to be the most dangerous to the civil peace of all the rest and itself presently, it is the Muslim faith as beheld by the extremist elements. But by contrasts to other faiths is it so dangerous both at its fundamental base but also by implication at its moderately practiced levels as well. But it is the tinder box now because its core code, carried in the Koran appears unambiguously as a direct antithesis to the Christian faiths, and the concept of Jihad seems to be gaining adherents at one level or another and, by contrast, it is the Christian faith across these various democracies that hold the preponderant military and economic power base in the world today The looming imminent danger is how these 2 faiths seem to be converging disastrously. In other words the danger is not in one or another alone, but how they converge relative to one another.

We might all hope that some deliverance is at hand and that that deliverance comes by some form of scientific or intellectual enlightenment where ideas and the compassionate understanding of history may help all to avoid these colliding forces, and not the hoped for intercession of some provident god choosing one set of notions or beliefs held by a particular faith or nation over another set.
All of humanity needs to stop and reflect together to examine the present values of absolute religions, whether Christian, Muslim, Hindu, whatever, in regards to the overall concerns for all humanity or we will all fall back together calamitously invoking both God and Allah and whatever violent Shivas in the fall...

To Wish Upon a Harvest Mars

or

Alice's Late Summer Night's "Looking Glass" Dream for the Red Planet




>>>>>>Read all about it!<<<<<<<<<

>>>>>>Hot on the Internet Wires<<<<<<

>>>>>>Earth is catching up with Mars in an encounter!<<<<<<

>>>>> The Red Planet is about to be spectacular<<<<< >>>> will appear 25.11 arc seconds wide. At a modest75-power ….check the fine print above …..

>>>>>>>Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye<<<<<

>>>>>>NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE THIS AGAIN<<<<

>>>>nor will the people of the next 50-to-1,000 Life Times!<<<<<

>>>>>>Share this with your children and grandchildren<<<<<

~INTERMISSION ~

Hey scientists, sea captains,(retired), deckhands and star trackers of all stripe, I wanna get in on this astronomical condiment too- this sweet confection of a wonderment- as we truckers on the north/south axis of the Midwest will likely get some choice opportunities for clear Mars sightings out on the prairie somewhere along the "aorta" of Interstate ~35~ between Dallas and the Twin cities sometime this summer...
Seems, according to some reported enthusiasms, that Mars is gonna beam as broad faced as the full harvest Moon come late August. That's quite a spectacular claim. Are we talking the full or the new moon here? Well, this assertion standing alone, stated w/ sincere erudition from the mad "retired" astronomy prof now well strolled about the grounds of some state institution would be one thing, but this anticipated beholding has bounded all over the internet this summer and talk is abuzz about a harvest Mars to rival the Moon in size and intensity.

All true believers need not read the next paragraph.

Maybe egg's gonna be all over my shirt come the waning days of this late summer night’s dream of a beaming Mars, but such filamentous confection from out of the ether do these internet looms sometimes weave! I'll add this caviar though... oops, caveat: if Mars meets our eyes like a big pizza pie come the dog days, I'll eat the egg and my shirt and the caviar to boot. And gladly too, as the little boy refusing adulthood in me wants for such phantasmajoric wishlings. This bodes very well for collective imagination's power though, and, in the era of Harry Potter and Lord of the Ring, it's a lovely thing to wish upon. More likely though this tells a wonderful tale of how a simple sentence juxtaposition error in a much forwarded e-mail from an "expert" has transposed into a quasi “Looking Glass” fantasy in real time.

As for the breadbasket and the prairie though, already in late July there are square miles upon square miles of crops thriving under our day star's searing intensity. Seems our sun is now even getting more blistering as all these trapped photons are glomming on longer to the green house funk before they reflect back out into space. Spanning the broad sweep of the Mississippi/Missouri water shed thriving in "waves of amber grain" out here all this leafy biomass keeps pushing toward the arc of the earthly covenant... [ the atmosphere].... sorry, no one was gonna get that one!

Turning the glass just so one can imagine the secret life of plants talking amongst themselves;imagining and dreaming for a better way for the supposed “Paragon of Animals” to conduct themselves as the "thinking" stewards of the Green Planet. Wondering what they might gossip about should the red planet beam her full passion red through one of Alice's “looking glass” refractions.

Yeah, plenty of private "dreaming fields" with rustling plants as background murmuring in these prairie night winds to stop and ponder under a Alice’s night sky out here. Corn and other leafy verdancies... (not a word.)... at least I don't think it's a word... do you??? ... anyway, verdant roughages of all kinds. Yes, and considering the moon’s new twin blushed in red , the Jabberwock will be frumiously bandersnatched skittering twilly in the prairie hollows above 2 shadows of equal intensity.

She/ he and her/his comrades, anticipating all this illicit night light joy, now w/ a new red cast, are already building for the excitement of August’s waning days under a big red Martian face. And all these crops too- billions of biomass tonnage weighty, spread out all across the wide belt of heartland just waiting for a "Harvest Mars" before the combine's Vorpal blades begin to whirr.

Wait a minute, did you say harvest mars?....
.... “What it is mon.... dis harvest mars????
“Hey rasta carrot top mon you be shakin dem dreads clean wit de sea lettuce and look’n in de night sky come august en you be see’n what it is mon…. dis harvest mars wit de big face"

Seeking respite from the sun's searing late summer rays, surely all these plants, especially the star leaning photo-tactic ones like the sunflowers, will be sun singed to confusion as to which bright faced heavenly countenance they should turn their sunny faces to for some cool refreshing night light. Should they face the new “big red” or the old “gold standard.” Should they pine to mars, the new passion lady/ femme fatale in red, or to the old familiar standby in gold, this ageless illumined sphere upon which so much lunacy has for so long been spent on flourishes as varied as Romeo'd yearnings, minstrel's song and...poet's sonnet and soliloquy.

“Good god there both the same size”, the soy sprout says to the sorghum spray, "one in gold, one in red”! "Just imagine", the North Dakotan alfalfa sprig whispers to the safflower stalk in late august, “one of’em gold, one of’em red with the aurora borealis dancing reggae in the background. “Which one for you”? Wow, the red planet w/ all her veiled passions, full hipped in the equatorials, will seem an alluring and novel provocateur w/ole Captain Hook singing "Oh my Mysterious Lady" to her in a tremulous baritone having broken the long top billing the Moon has held these past 5,000 years or so since Mars’ last passing so close.

On considering the mixed wisdoms of the thinking species,the wise old cabbage and the fluttering lettuce ruminate: “this 5,000 yrs just about spans 1/2 the time since the "thinking” species decided to come out of the foraging steppes and forests and start building fences and grand monuments like the pyramids and world trade towers’ n such, and started squatting as agriculturalists and started planting us leafy ones en-masse.. And soon thereafter began naming, mapping and numbering in brightness hierarchies these stars and other heavenly bodies and planets and moons’n such while wondering on them much less by the way, save for an occasional Shakespeare and a minstrel or 2. And when all the great orders of being began to fall into place, they started forming camps as to who had it right on just what the original intentions of the creator of the universe were".

"Well It was shortly after this “coming out” into the waves of amber grain that things started to get real organized too leafy one. So organized that legions of ancient mariners waged great sea battles all because of a single face. Guided by these starry constellations at night, and planning these ghastly beachheads by day, they ventured headlong into a history that their progeny would somehow glorify in legend, poetry and song. "Just imagine Laratese Lettuce Head, a single pretty face all lit up in the ancient moonlight launching a thousand war ships! That’s organization for ya my man. What's that you said, maybe they should’ve stayed in the woods. And now this great order has led to all these civilized schisms colliding all because each camp is so certain about the primordial intentions of the creator of the universe, including the creator of new red provocateur’s imminent cameo. Is it Allah’s moon Laratese? Is it the godhead of the trinity’s Mars? As for me, those mariners were the “ancients” and their progeny still are the “ancients” under these same constellations in the night sky, with still so much more darkness than light. So there!”

“Ah let’s leave it alone Laratese Lettuce Head. Let’s just look at the twin beauties, listen to John Lennon’s “Imagine” and leave all that alone for now, ok”?

But, just one more thing, for better or worse all these supposed "efficiencies" the thinking species have come to has led to this Laratese: Wondering on the stars and planets and we leafy greens much less and worrying more about when a closer Wal*Mart might come to the neighborhood….. but I digress from these orbed twins, illumined in red and gold” “Well, as I was just saying, let’s just leave all that alone, and get back to these twin skittering shadows dancing in the mars/ moon light".
.
“Ah,well,” the Jabberwock whispers to the alfalfa sprig, “there's still enough old fossilized biomass cisterned in the ground, and stuck in rocks to hyper burn awhile longer, gassing up the arc of the earthly covenant, with all these green house emissions a churnin and a burnin just enough green house funk to create the magnified illusion amongst the “thinking” species of an equal sized apparition - a celestial ghost of the red planet”. “How many arc seconds, or was it minutes across the night sky you say paints the apparent size of the red planet Palonius? Oh shit… ooops, sorry, just a few fleeting arc seconds you said.. The moon’s got the minutes my man and by a factor of some 60 times still appears larger, though in absolute terms it is not … Alas it still gets top billing after all.”
Ah, well, one can still dream for the next passing in 60,000 yrs. Dream through all the churnin, burnin haze….
Epilogue
God, we can wish for Mars to rival the breadth of the Moon's harvest face, and for plants talking to warn us about the churnin and a burnin funk. And we can imagine what nightly countenance the sunflower might turn her face toward, or to what brutal realities we turn our own faces away from when reflecting upon our crimes against the arc of the earthly covenant and to the belly of this Green Planet too. Or we can skip to ma lou, as we’ve done so long now, through the prairie grasses at night with the Jabberwock under 2 different shadows of the Tumtum tree, while humming Lennon’s tune, and wait and see what the dog days will bring…

….See ya out on the prairie…